The known prior art of interest for electronic musical composition games use extended surface game play areas for accommodating multiple separately received game components, tokens or cards at different spaces or slots at a matrix of sensors with respect to the game surface. Both U.S. Pat. No. 6,525,252 issued to Klausen, et al. (hereafter ‘Klausen’) in 2003 for a “Device for Composing and Arranging Music,” and U.S. Publication No. 2010/0043625 A1 published in 2010 to Van Geenen, et al. (hereafter ‘Van Geenen’) for a “Musical Composition System and Method of Controlling a Generation of a Musical Composition” disclose devices for composing, arranging music, game boards and game play incorporating sensor devices, a plurality of game pieces, tokens or blocks for being received or arranged at sending or receiving positions with various playback game modes. The sensor device has a plurality of receiving positions, with pre-determined musical features, notes, beats, clips or samples for suitable musical features. These systems provide for spatial placement tokens by users on a spatial board configuration, determining respective locations and types of an assembly of tokens placed in a spatial configuration for translating a spatial ordering of the tokens in the spatial configuration into a temporal ordering, including arranged to detect or prevent at least an attempted placement of a token of a certain type at a position in the spatial ordering violating any of at least one constraint associated with the certain type.
Klausen discloses as an example, a musical block system including several musical blocks 1a-1d, FIG. 1, a plate part 2, FIG. 2, a sensor part 5, FIG. 3, and an optional sensor block. The musical block represents a note, a rhythm, a melodic sequence or other musical parameters. Each musical block may have a different shape and/or color and must be able to be stacked vertically. The plate part is an object to which the blocks are attached and is a two-dimensional array (x and y) where one axis equals time and the other axis determines which instrument/sample track to activate. The sensor part is able to determine where the blocks are placed on the plate part and which type of block each is. The sensor part includes a loudspeaker 6, a microphone 7, a connecting part 4, and a control panel 8 having a number of control buttons 9a-9c, such as ‘play’, ‘record’ and ‘stop’. The different positions of the blocks along the y-axis may represent different instrument tracks and each sub-population represents a certain musical feature. The sensor part determines position of the blocks and to which sub-population they belong allowing the creation of music composition, arrangements, soundscapes or other musical expressions. As blocks are moved the composition is changed accordingly.
The tokens 5, 6, 7 of Van Geenen, are configured for placement by a user in a spatial configuration on a playing surface 8 of the game board 2. The playing surface 8 comprises a number of fields 9, arranged in rows 10a-10e and columns 11a-11j. The columns determine a spatial ordering, which is translated into a temporal ordering by the control unit 3. That is to say that a first column 11 a represents a first time interval of the composition and that the time advances by a certain time interval with each column. The time interval may be an absolute time interval or a relative time interval. For example, each column 11 may represent a bar, a beat or a note of a particular duration, depending on the chosen granularity.
The Van Geenen game board 2 includes sensors 13 positioned within the game board and arranged to determine the types of tokens placed on a field present over the respective sensor 13. The sensor 13 may be a type of connector for mating with a corresponding connector on a token placed on the field, so as to interrogate the token as to its type and that of any token stacked on top of it. In another embodiment, the tokens 5-7 are provided with Radio-Frequency Identification tags, and the sensors 13 comprise transceivers for reading out type information from the tags. Other wireless or wired variants are conceivable, such as those using near field communication.
The Van Geenen interface 14 in the game board 2 allows the respective locations and types of the tokens 5-7 assembled in a spatial configuration on the playing surface 8 to be communicated to the control unit 3 via a corresponding interface 15 in the control unit 3. The latter comprises a processor 16, programmed by means of instructions stored in a memory unit 17. The processor 16 has access to a further memory unit 18 containing data representative of composition rules as well as a database relating token types to aspects of musical fragments. The processor 16 is also able to control the visual display unit 4, as well as an audio output stage 19 for driving a speaker system 20. The Van Geenen spatial configuration, i.e., the amalgamation of the sub-assemblies of tokens, is placed on different game boards 2, connected to control units in communication with each other. In that case, the users of the several game boards 2 could collaborate over a distance to compose a single piece of music. Such a system allowing for collaboration is even easier to implement using several embodiments of the second composition system. In particular the second composition system may dispense with a game board on which tokens are to be placed, but may instead use only representations of interlocking blocks or other types of tangible objects. Tokens of different dimensions may be used to represent aspects of fragments of corresponding different lengths, i.e. durations.